The people, real as they are, become approximations. Some of the backgrounds are marvelously like van Gogh’s landscapes. The hands in Loving Vincent are not van Gogh hands.Īs a work of animation, Loving Vincent is extraordinary. Hands are hands, no more or less important than any other element. He emphasized certain elements (you can almost feel Roulin’s bushy beard) while sketching others in loosely (his postman’s uniform). Time and again van Gogh drew hands that almost over-emphasized their structure. Roulin’s right hand, resting on the arm of the chair (which appears to have only the one arm) is curiously flat and sketched in. Roulin’s left hand, which is hanging loose off the table, is carefully delineated, but the positioning of each finger is awkward. Van Gogh had trouble with hands: it’s as though he was aware of each bone separately, and had a hard time uniting them into a coherent whole.
Roulin sits somewhat awkwardly in a chair, his left forearm resting on a table. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, BostonĬonsider van Gogh’s Portrait of the Postman, Joseph Roulin (above), painted in the summer of 1888. Which brings me to Loving Vincent, a hand-painted animated film that is, while lush and a great achievement, rotoscoped throughout. Figure drawing classes became a requisite part of training believable human figures became possible without the need for a live-action guide. As the field of hand-drawn animation grew, demands on the artists grew apace. When Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, few animators could approximate a human figure with any accuracy – I say few, because I know of only one, the comics and animation genius, Winsor McCay, but there might be other, more obscure examples.
Second, it’s a substitute for the artistic skill of the animator. Motion in cartoons is more dance-like, fluid in ways live actors cannot or should not emulate. This gradual abandonment of rotoscoping is, I think, a good thing.įirst, rotoscoping removes a lot of the artist’s freedom to exaggerate motion in appropriate ways. The process is still used today, largely done by computer in visual effects work, where separately filmed elements need to be combined, but it is hardly ever used in cartoon animation anymore. The expense and time involved put rotoscoping on the back shelf as a special process, though it was put to usually detrimental use in a number of director Ralph Bakshi’s animated features, such as Wizards (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), and Fire and Ice (1983). Though conceived of as a short-cut, it proved to be a laborious process that was only used for special occasions – Snow White in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is rotoscoped. An animator then traced each frame onto paper to create animation that has wholly realistic motion. Fleischer filmed his brother, Dave, wearing a clown suit, then projected each frame of film onto a sheet of glass.
Rotoscoping is a technique in animation developed by director Max Fleischer in 1915. Robert Gulaczyk as Vincent van Gogh in Loving Vincent (2017)
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